Sunday, October 24, 2010

Más Caro

— I tried staying up late last night to watch the inaugural Korean Grand Prix, but the weather over there was so foul that the early stages involved a parade led by the safety car. So I got a little shut-eye before picking things up again at 3am, just after Vettel's Red Bull had been forced to retire. (Yay!)

The commentary on Fox Sports is so awful (invariably hosted by three smug, opinionated Argies in a garishly-decorated studio) that I've been tempted to download the BBC coverage via iPlayer and watch that, albeit not live. One of the smug Argies surpassed himself last night with a grossly machista remark as the top three drivers passed a group of beautiful Korean models clapping away as the jubilant men made their way to the podium: "They smile, they applaud, but they have no idea what's going on."

There's no denying the chauvinistic ambience in Formula One, but really, even my dog knows what's going on: It's not cricket or American Football, it's a bunch of little cars going round in circles. Viewers were anyway left uncertain whether the ladies in question were clueless primarily because of their gender or because they were Koreans, and therefore not innately knowledgeable about all sport like the citizens of Argentina!

— There was a great debate on BBC Dateline yesterday hosted by Gavin Esler in which leading journalists from the UK, Germany, France and the USA debated the effectiveness of austerity cuts. The LA Times's Henry Chu looked a bit sidelined, even in the parts where Wayne Rooney's massive pay rise wasn't driving the indignation. The best comment came from La Vie's Agnes Poirier, who remarked that : "You 'ave a kind of masochism in this country. You seem to like suffering 'ardship. You did it in 1940...and thank you very much."

— Die-hard followers of GuateLiving have been treated to an experience akin to an extended remake of Night Of the Living Dead this past week. But the zombie-blog may well have shambled its last now because the word is there are no more Cassmans left in Guatemala for us to worry ourselves about. You can certainly see what Don Marco meant about hatemail now: the censors should have stepped in a long while back to curtail the flow of vitriol which has greeted each new automated post. Anyway, I only bring this up because one little incident this week reminded me of Don Marco's persistent animus against the racial profiling that apparently went on in his local tienda. V was telling Doña C how a number of the regatonas in the market have a known tendency to charge me "precios más caros". To Doña C there was nothing heinous about this at all; no, the logic was altogether clear: "Si, porque él es más caro."

Happy in the knowledge that I am reassuringly expensive, I will now get on with my Sunday.